Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to methods and systems for providing customer insights in a contact center and more particularly to providing customer insights across multiple channels based on cross-channel interactions with the customer.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems or other contact center systems provide support for customers of a product or service by allowing those users to make requests for service that can include a question posed by the user related to the product or service. Generally speaking, these systems receive requests for service, e.g., in the form of a phone call, web page form, instant message, email, etc., and route the requests to a human agent for addressing the request and providing an answer to the question. In ideal cases, the agent is selected based on the topic of the question or request and a predefined profile of that agent that includes indications of the agent's skills and/or expertise. This selection process, steps and processes to be performed by that agent, as well as numerous other processes performed by the contact center are defined in and controlled by any number of different workflows.
Contact centers typically try to offer personalized service to their customers, for example based on a current or previous interaction with that customer. However, current systems take a siloed approach to these customizations. For example, a web portal may determine the customer's priority purely based on the content of their shopping cart (i.e., based on information from an eCommerce system or application), without realizing that this customer may be a long time loyal customer (i.e., based on information from a sales system or application), or a frustrated customer with five severity 1 incidents (i.e., based on information from a service system or application). Even when the web portal correctly determines that it is dealing with a VIP customer and decides to proactively engage the customer, it may not be able to apply that information across various possible contact channels. For example, the web portal may not know that the customer has historically preferred click-to-chat over click-to-call in the eCommerce application and so may proceed to ask the customer what channel he prefers.
In other words, these siloed approaches do not leverage data from multiple CRM systems (e.g. sales, marketing, service, eCommerce) to create a unified set of customer insights and do not deliver a personalized and efficient customer experience consistently across different channels (which represent the touch points to the customer—e.g. web portal, voice, email, chat, social etc.) Thus, these approaches are sub-optimal and the total solution is inconsistent and difficult to maintain. Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems for providing customer insights across multiple channels based on cross-channel interactions with the customer.